Do we like Emma Thompson?
Our score: 9 out of 10. Years of backing trans people, refugees, the climate and women in her own words and work, and no harm or mistreatment on the record we could find.
Thompson is one of Britain's best-known actors and writers. Hay Festival, which gave her its Medal for Drama in May 2026, notes that she remains the only person to win Academy Awards for both acting and writing. That is the public Emma: big career, big voice, and not shy about using it.
The best story about her is the one where she walked. In early 2019 she withdrew from the animated film Luck after Skydance hired John Lasseter, who had left Disney after acknowledging “missteps” with female staff. She wrote to Skydance's boss saying it was “very odd to me that you and your company would consider hiring someone” with that history. Skydance declined to comment, and that is a real cost for an actor who had already signed on.
On the harm check she comes up clean. In 2019 she was among more than 70 women who signed a letter in The Herald backing trans rights during Scotland's debate over gender recognition reform. It said “We support trans rights.” She has since been cast in Hear Me Roar, a drama about a trans woman's fight to have her marriage legally recognised, with trans actor Rebecca Root also in the cast.
The planet and migrants are the other half of it. In April 2019 she joined Extinction Rebellion's Oxford Circus protest and read poetry from the group's pink boat, telling reporters “Our planet is in serious trouble.” She is also executive producer of Everybody to Kenmure Street, a documentary about Glasgow residents who staged a sit-in against a Home Office immigration raid in 2021. She plays the man who slid under the van in the re-enactments.
More recently, in late May 2026, she backed calls for cinema to catch up after a study found very few top films led by a woman over 60. It is a fair cause for an actor of her age and standing to pick up, and it fits the pattern of her using her platform for others rather than herself.
She is not a saint with no sense of humour. In August 2025 she told the Locarno festival that Donald Trump rang her in 1998 and asked her to dinner, and she joked she could have changed American history by saying yes. That is a funny anecdote, not a political statement.